By Arun Kumar, IANS,
Washington: Days after being short listed for the Man Booker prize for her new novel, “The Lowland”, Pulitzer Prize winning Indian American author Jhumpa Lahiri has been shortlisted for the 2013 US National Book Award in fiction.
Lahiri’s tale of two brothers set in Kolkata of the 1960s has been listed along with nine other works, including Tom Drury’s “Pacific”, Elizabeth Graver’s “The End of the Point” and Rachel Kushner’s “The Flamethrowers.”
The National Book Foundation said finalists in the Young People’s Literature, Poetry, Nonfiction and Fiction categories would be announced on Oct 16 and the winners will be named at a ceremony in New York on Nov 20.
Born in London, 46-year-old Lahiri, who lives in Brooklyn, New York is the daughter of immigrants from West Bengal.
She is the author of three previous books. Her debut collection of stories, “Interpreter of Maladies”, won the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN/Hemingway Award.
Her novel “The Namesake” was a New York Times Notable Book and was selected as one of the best books of the year by USA Today and Entertainment Weekly, among other publications.
“The Namesake” was also adapted into a film of the same name by acclaimed filmmaker Mira Nair.
Her second book of short stories, “Unaccustomed Earth”, was named one of the ten best books of the year by The New York Times Book Review.
In a review of her latest novel, the New York Times noted: “Jhumpa Lahiri first made her name with quiet, meticulously observed stories about Indian immigrants trying to adjust to new lives in the United States, stories that had the hushed intimacy of chamber music.”
“The premise of her new novel, ‘The Lowland,’ in contrast, is startlingly operatic,” the influential US daily said calling it “certainly Ms. Lahiri’s most ambitious undertaking yet,” that “eventually opens out into a moving family story.”
(Arun Kumar can be contacted at [email protected])